by Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a great cultural figure – a sculptor who belonged to the American underground generation, involved in process art and made experimental films, but who represented an earlier and more heroic age . The critic Robert Hughes described him as “the ultimate abstract painter”.
Although this statement stretches the point, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led to a number of strange acts that belie the seriousness of his large public commissions. Weight and Measure, done in the early 1990s for what is now Tate Britain, showed its sharp side, with its massive steel forms designed to counter the excessive classicism of the building. However, some of his other works, such as the complex, “torque” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005, are positively baroque.
Set around an existing sculpture, Snake, commissioned for the opening of the museum in 1997, these steel works, dominated by ellipses and spirals, articulate spaces where the gallery visitor can go astray They are substantial enough to rival the grand architecture of Frank Gehry, but, with their patinated surfaces and curved forms, they also have a personal, sensual quality. Above all, Serra’s sculptures create a great interaction with the public and a strong experience of gradual discovery – hence the title of the installation, The Matter of Time.
His work has been popular with curators, but not limited to museums. They have appeared in settings as diverse as the Tuileries garden in Paris, the Federal Plaza in New York, and the Qatari desert, attracting responses from admiration to public inquiry. One of his sculptures, Fulcrum, was erected in 1987 at Broadgate outside Liverpool Street station in London. It manages to combine memorials with fragility, made of weathered steel plates that seem to support each other precariously.
He was born in San Francisco into a family that provided the basis for his later career as a metal sculptor. His father, Tony, who was from Majorca, was a pipe fitter in a naval shipyard. His mother, Gladys (nee Fineberg), the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, used to introduce her son as “Richard, the artist” and, subsequently, was very enthusiastic when he started making his way in New York. Serra himself worked in the steel mills during his time as a student and later, in 1979, he made a compelling film, Steelmill/Stahlwerk, about German workers in the industry.
Serra began his studies in 1957 at the University of California at Berkeley, graduating from the institution’s Santa Barbara campus with a degree in English literature. He followed this in 1961 with a three-year course in painting at Yale University, New Haven – a period during which he also worked as a teaching assistant and proofreader for Joseph Albers’ book, Interaction of Color (1963). At Yale he met luminaries such as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, before winning a fellowship that took him to Europe in 1964.
In Paris, Serra was fascinated by the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși, but in Florence the following year he continued to paint, producing colored grids in timed conditions controlled by a stopwatch. It was only with his first exhibition, at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966, that he made a decisive move away from painting, filling cages with live and stuffed animals.
After moving to New York that same year, Serra first survived by setting himself up as a furniture manager, along with his friends, composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Serra’s artistic development was rapid at this time, moving from experiments with rubber tubes, fiberglass and neon to the metal sculpture for which he became famous. He soon began his long-term relationship with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, and in its Warehouse annex he was built in 1969 throwing molten lead at the wall with a ladle.
In the same year Serra refined this procedure by flashing metal against a small steel plate stuck in the corner of Jasper Johns’ studio. The “casts” produced when the lead cooled down were rough expressive forms, but this project also inspired Serra to create more impersonal pieces, in which sheets of metal were wedged into the corners of rooms, tilted against each other or pinned to to the wall with lead pipes. His emphasis on objective phenomena – mass, gravity and other physical forces – can also be seen in his notable experimental films.
In Hand Catching Lead (1968), the hand is actually the artist’s hand but is shown disembodied, trying to grasp rather than throw falling pieces of lead, which he falls or misses altogether. The repetition of this crucial action gives the film a serial quality, much like the celluloid process itself.
Serra’s involvement with the pioneers led him to work with land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. In 1970 he helped them with Spiral Jetty at Great Salt Lake in Utah and, after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped complete the Amarillo Ramp in an artificial lake in Texas. His own site-specific sculptures included Spin Out: For Bob Smithson (1972-73), in the park environment of the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. The three interlocking steel plates interacted here with each other and with their surroundings, reflecting Serra’s aim that “the whole space will be a sculptural expression”.
The 1970s were a difficult decade in Serra’s life. In 1971 a worker was killed in an accident during the installation of a Serra sculpture outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His five-year marriage to artist Nancy Graves ended in 1970, and his father’s death followed his mother’s suicide in 1977 two years later. However, in that decade he also met his future wife, the art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he collaborated on Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Clara also played a vital role in shaping her sculpture, as well as giving her name to Clara-Clara, a powerful curvilinear work that was installed in the Tuileries garden in 1983. The history of this piece reflects Serra’s problems with positioning . – particular art, because it was originally intended to appear in a show at the Pompidou Center, but it was considered too heavy at a late stage.
The horror of Clara-Clara paled in comparison to the controversies surrounding Tilted Arc, a 36-meter-long sculpture erected at Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1981. Criticized for being intrusive, a magnet for ‘graffiti artists and even a security risk. finally in 1989, four years after a public hearing in which the majority of witnesses recommended its preservation.
Despite this setback, Serra’s career continued to grow. He had two retrospectives, in 1986 and 2007, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which devoted a permanent room to his monumental work Equal (2015), as well as major exhibitions at home and abroad. He has exhibited frequently with his gallery, Gagosian, in London, New York and Paris, most recently in 2021.
In 2001 he was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, the Légion d’honneur in France in 2015 and, three years later, the J Paul Getty Medal.
During his last years, Serra was very involved in public projects in Qatar, above all the four steel plates, which rose to over 14 meters and lasted more than a kilometer, built west of Doha in 2014. It is called East-West/West-East. , the work brilliantly engages with its surroundings, the gypsum plateau of the Brouq nature reserve in the Dukhan desert. Serra himself described it as “the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done”.
He has Clara safe.
• Richard Serra, artist, born 2 November 1938; he died 26 March 2024
